One unanticipated consequence
of my biography Shade of the Raintree:
The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr. (Viking, 1994)was that, more than book tours and signings within the literary
community, I was recognized as a "suicide survivor"
by suicide organizations and asked to speak at many conferences
over a two-year period. (A "suicide survivor" is someone
who has suffered the loss of a loved one through suicide.) To
my surprise, I received a suicide prevention award and was featured
in People magazine. In 1998 I did receive a literary
award, the MidAmerica Award, given by the Society for the Study
of Midwestern Literature.
We don't think
of Woolf, Hemingway, or even Hart Crane as literary suicides
first and foremost-they are remembered more for their work than
for the manner of their departure. But Ross Lockridge, Jr., despite
his assault on Mount Parnassus, still tends to be remembered
mostly as a young literary suicide.
Growing up in
the wake of his death, I didn't regard myself as a severely challenged
suicide survivor but as the offspring of a gifted writer who
died young. Still, in the forensic spirit of my biography, I
attempted to account for this early death at the peak of acclaim.
Based on my sample group of one, I proposed a "convergence
theory" of suicide as keynoter of the 28th annual Convention
of the American Association of Suicidologists in May, 1995. I
was making explicit what is implicit in the biography's narrative.
Edwin Shneidman, who coined the very term "suicidology,"
was impressed enough to request a blurb for his 1996 study, The
Suicidal Mind (Oxford UP). Not meant to apply to all cases,
the theory in brief is that suicide can be the unfortunate consequence
of a convergence of factors, not a single underlying cause or
crushing event. In the case of Ross Lockridge, Jr., there were
three: a personality vulnerability tied in with his great
ambition, which entailed linkages among creativity, grandiosity,
and paranoia; a biological/genetic predisposition, evidenced
in the mental illness of his double-second cousin Mary Jane Ward,
author of The Snake Pit (Random House, 1946) and in other
family members; and culturalforces related to
the phenomenon of success in America and to authorship in particular.
The result of the convergence, narrated in the final three chapters
of Shade of the Raintree, was a sudden onset of major
depression-the only one he suffered in his largely upbeat life
and for which he was unprepared. William Lowe Bryan, President
of Indiana University, put it best: after great effort, "there's
an exhaustion of whatever it is that is the mother of emotion,
so that the ordinary impulses of youth, of joy and satisfaction,
are dead for a time" (Shade, p. 451). In a delusional
state of mind, Ross Lockridge, Jr. died of depression ending
in suicide. Suicide seemed the only possible release from pain,
at least for him at the time, if not for his survivors. "The
answer you seek is in an envelope," read the fortune cookie
I mention in the first chapter, but no such envelope with a single
simple explanation turned up-and it still has not.
Reviewers of
the biography were generally enthusiastic but said little about
its forensic dimension, sometimes even calling it "a tribute,"
not my intent.
Like any biographer
I anticipated the emergence of any new information on my subject
with both hope and dread. What if that envelope containing the
"answer" turned up? What if the letter my father wrote
to an Armenian friend shortly before his death were found somewhere
and suggested causes or motives that had eluded me? What if the
"secret" Elsie Shockley Lockridge told her homecare
nurse late in life emerged to upend my apple carts? When in 1995
my brother Ernest accidentally discovered some fifty documents-mostly
letters to our father-that had fallen at random beneath the bottom
drawer of his otherwise emptied filing cabinet, I held my breath,
as would any biographer. What if a document emerged to contradict
the biography in a serious way?
But there were
no major revelations. Some telegrams from Lockridge to his wife
sent from New York during the negotiations with MGM in late June
1947 offer refinements in the timing of this intense moment.
A letter from Nanette Kutner to my parents of January 28, 1948
shows that this journalist's visit to Bloomington took place
in late January instead of early February. More important, a
letter from Marion Monaco scuttled Larry Wylie's passing suggestion
to me in an interview that Lockridge may have visited her in
early 1947 while revising his novel in the offices of Houghton
Mifflin or in New York and then Boston again during the MGM negotiations-there
had been a "lost day," Wylie said. For a number of
reasons I decided this was a false lead that did not belong in
the biography. Monaco's letter, dated July 28, 1947, confirmed
that it indeed was, for she did not even know that Houghton Mifflin
would be the publisher and was surprised, like everybody else,
by his winning the MGM award. She wrote to congratulate him.
Nothing has ever
come to light to suggest that Lockridge ever compromised his
marriage vows. I undertook the biography with the conviction,
announced to my larger family, that I would follow the evidence
wherever it took me. Had I uncovered evidence of an extramarital
affair, I would have postponed publication until after my mother's
death by cancer, increasingly imminent as I wrote. She died on
August 8, 1994, four months after publication of Shade.
There would have been no reason to speak to a dying wife of an
infidelity-but I would certainly thereafter have written of it
to my readership, whether it had anything to do with the suicide
or not.
There was another
story I eventually dismissed as a false lead-a frequent experience
in any biographical undertaking, but this one was weightier.
This was my brother Ernest's theory that our father had been
the victim of childhood sexual abuse by his father, which ultimately
occasioned the suicide. I kept this theory in mind as I went
about my research, turning up no evidence for it but instead
a substantial amount of counterevidence, described below. Even
so, on December 6, 1991, I wrote to Ernest, "I'm leaning
toward including the thing about Grandpa-for two reasons, minimally.
First, there are so many people who have heard about it [from
Ernest himself] that it might surface anyway, and certainly you'd
be within your rights to speak or write about it at some time.
I don't wish my book to recapitulate in any way one of the things
I talk about-family coverup-and I don't relish the idea that
at some point it would be made clear that I'd omitted part of
the story" (Lilly Library papers; Box 15; my copy, includes
note on subsequent phone call).
He received my
letter the following day and telephoned me. He implored me not
to speak of his theory for which, he agreed, there was absolutely
no evidence. He said he probably loved his long deceased grandfather
and vowed he would take his dark conjecture to the grave. With
misgivings as to whether he would keep the vow, I agreed not
to bring it up in my biography. This was not, I felt,
a compromise of my commitment to full disclosure because I had
already come to regard his theory as a false lead, for the many
reasons I discuss below.
There was another
consideration that made me less reluctant to agree to Ernest's
urgent request. Even to have broached the possibility of sexual
abuse would have hijacked discussion of the biography, as the
complex of contributing factors, the convergence, would
have been pushed aside in favor of this simpler and sensational
but also by the 1990s more conventional claim. Had I felt there
was any plausibility in Ernest's claim, I would have been duty-bound
to discuss it. But because it lacked plausibility, I did not
wish to give readers the option of a narrative with a single
villain in a familiar story of sexual criminality.
As a child I
had known Ross Lockridge, Senior in the late forties and early
fifties before his death in 1952 as someone who needed a nitroglycerin
pill to finish climbing the staircase of the First Methodist
Church. He was slowly dying of congestive heart disease. He was
storyteller to me, my sister Jeanne, my brother Ernest, and our
cousin Kay Lockridge, closer to Ernest's age. Storytelling was
part of a bedtime ritual described in Shade where we could
choose between his frontier tales and Elsie Lockridge's Tommy
and Zippy stories. Neither Jeanne nor I nor Kay, who would go
on to be a journalist and outspoken feminist, remembers anything
of a sexual nature in this ritual, in itself not decisive, since
Ernest can say he was singled out. If we chose a story by our
grandfather, we would share the small sunroom for the night,
where we slept in a cot and our grandfather slept in his own
small bed.
Ernest first
spoke of his theory of sexual abuse at a family reunion in Bloomington
in August 1979, late into a beer-drinking fest in the backyard
when our mother had already turned in. Ernest began talking of
what he regarded as family secrets. First among them was his
conviction that our mother had had an affair with Ross Senior
shortly following the death of Ross Junior. What was the evidence?
we asked, flabbergasted. One day, as a boy of nine, he had witnessed
what he described as a passionate kiss of the two upon Ross Senior's
departure from our house on Stull Avenue in Bloomington. My other
siblings and I assumed this was Ernest engaged as usual in hyperbole
for the sake of a good story. The probability of Vernice Baker
Lockridge having an affair with Ross Lockridge, Senior was as
slim as Mother Teresa having one with Mahatma Gandhi.
His credibility
already undercut, Ernest went on to say that Ross Senior had
groped him during bedtime rituals, through his pajamas, as he
later told me. At the time in the backyard in 1979, we thought
this was more likely, as with the story of the affair, some vestigial
memory blown out of proportion over the decades. It was difficult
for the rest of us to reconceive our aged, sad, and wheezy grandfather
as a sexual predator. Ernest himself had often spoken with admiration
of Ross Senior. Upon the appearance of Ross and Tom, a
thinly researched, best-selling dual biography of our father
and Thomas Heggen, Ernest wrote author John Leggett a letter
(April 8, 1974), never sent, that seconded our mother's strong
objections to the portrayal of Ross Senior. Ernest wished Leggett
had not found it necessary to downgrade Ross Senior, who should
have been permitted to speak more directly to the reader (Lilly
Library papers; Box 3). Thereafter, when the two of us were engaged
in editing a selection of letters (never published) that our
father wrote as a teenager from Europe in 1933-34, in good measure
to undermine Leggett's portrait of Ross Junior as a naive Hoosier
bumpkin, Ernest spoke to me briefly about the possibility of
one or the other of us writing a biography of our grandfather,
not our father. It did not occur to me until late in 1988 to
write a biography of our father that might, as I hoped,
be more deeply researched and trusted than Ross and Tom.
My other siblings
and I could hardly have been conspiring to deny the truth, for
this was not the grandfather we knew or the grandfather Ernest
had previously spoken of. Ours is a culture in which we are predisposed
to believe those who speak out as victims of child sexual abuse.
The burden of disproof is on the accused, and there is often
justice in this, but Ross Senior is not here to explain or defend
himself.
In 2011 Ernest
Lockridge self-published Skeleton Key to the Suicide of my
Father, Ross Lockridge, Jr., Author of Raintree County, which
takes the form of an unhappy 170-page scrapbook with commentary.He likens Ross Senior to the infamous Count Cenci of Percy
Shelley's tragic drama, The Cenci, in which the Count
celebrates at a dinner party the recent deaths of two of his
sons and then incestuously rapes his daughter, Beatrice, who
retaliates with patricide. Is this our grandfather, "Mr.
Indiana," the celebrated Hoosier historian? my younger siblings
and I asked, again flabbergasted. In one section Ernest narrates
an early dialogue with our aunt Lillian Lockridge and grandmother
Elsie Lockridge-dialogue he first wrote in the context of an
unpublished novel of 1997 and reiterates verbatim here. He recounts
a moment when Lillian, accompanied by Elsie, questioned him about
what had happened with his grandfather during sleepovers directly
following the suicide of Ross Junior, when Ernest was nine. In
response to Lillian's graphic questions, Ernest replied emphatically
no to any suggestion of oral or anal sex but not to gropings.
Our mother was kept in the dark as to what was being said in
the interview and wondered whether Ernest might have done something
punishable. According to Ernest, she told Lillian and Elsie at
the time that she had "always had only the highest regard
for Ernest's grandfather."
I cannot say
whether this episode did or did not happen as Ernest recounts
it. And to this day I do not know for sure whether the abuse
happened as described. Ernest is emphatic that it happened. If
it did, I am sorry for the injustice and his distress.
Assuming totally
inappropriate behavior by our grandfather toward my brother,
the question remains as to whether childhood sexual abuse of
Ross Junior by Ross Senior is the skeleton key to the suicide,
as Ernest insists, based on extrapolation of his recollections
of his own experience with Ross Senior. Here, I am certain the
answer is no. It is not
the total lack of direct evidence that I'd emphasize; it is all
the counterevidence. I'll outline it here. Cumulatively,
it makes a strong case for exculpation of Ross Senior as sexual
predator of Ross Junior.

Camping
on the old Lockridge farm was Ross Senior's favorite diversion.
He and his son are photographed by three-year-old Ernest in the
summer of 1942.

*I'll
begin with the only direct portrait of Ross Senior by Ross Junior,
found in his one-act play, The Inheritors, described on
pp. 145-49 in Shade and based on what Ross Jr. calls a
"bit of realism." In this play Ross Senior comes off
not as a predator of any stripe but as a powerless and pathetic
wimp within the domestic circle of his wife Elsie and two domineering
siblings, Marie and Earl Lockridge, who are splitting up the
spoils of the old Brenton Webster Lockridge estate in Peru, Miami
County. The play ends with Ross Senior having taken nothing of
the household valuables but a few books and photographs. He finally
finds a photograph of his mother-his siblings "must have
overlooked it." He speaks "slow and a little sheepishly"
of how his mother "always thought I had great promise because
of my university record. (He laughs at the contemplation of his
own accomplishments.) But I guess I wasn't much of a satisfaction
to Mamma." The son-playwright lends a wincing sympathy to
his passive and defeated father here.*Ernest
thinks Ross Senior sexually abused his two other sons, Robert
Bruce and Vivian Shockley, with devastating consequences. Evidence
of this, apart from Robert Bruce's thinking he could swim when
he couldn't and drowning at an early age, and Vivian Shockley
becoming an alcoholic in his twenties, is a photograph of Ross
Senior ripped into four pieces by Shockley following the deaths
of Elsie Lockridge and Lillian. But Shockley ripped apart dozens
and dozens of family photographs, including those of his mother,
sister, and brothers, and ditched other portions of the family
archive. He was unfortunately no saver and was simply cleaning
out the house according to his own lights.
When John Leggett
published Ross and Tom, Shockley Lockridge objected only
to the portrayal of Ross Senior, not to that of Ross Junior.
In a letter to Leggett of June 17, 1974, he objected to Leggett's
speculation that Ross Junior felt extreme guilt for having "demolished"
his father in writing a better book than he ever had. Ross Senior,
according to Leggett, had been deeply hurt by his son's success
and Ross Junior sensed this, feeling a deep guilt. (Few reviewers
were convinced by Leggett's simplistic Freudian explanation of
the suicide.) Shockley writes of Ross Senior that he "had
entered his seventies. He was in failing health, and I am sure
that he entertained no further ambitions for himself. He took
the keenest enjoyment-in fact gloried-in Ross' achievements.
We all did . . . My father was a naive and trustful man. I can
recall how hurt and shocked he was when an imagined friend let
him down (as in a state textbook adoption.) He was an exceptionally
good speaker . . ." Shockley goes on for three paragraphs
defending Ross Senior from Leggett's portrayal of someone schooled
in "ballyhoo": "I don't recall any extravagant
advertising blurbs or capers employed to promote attendance at
his well-known 'site recitals' of Indiana history." He objects
to Leggett's description of Ross Senior as having the "faintly
spurious air of medicine man," observes that he received
an honorary doctorate, and that he "simply loved Indiana
history and Indian lore ever since his boyhood on the Lockridge
farm in Miami County, near PawPaw . . . Note that in 1922 he
was a founder and the first president of the Fort Wayne Historical
Society."
This would be
an improbable tribute if this same "naive and trustful man"
had sexually abused Vivian Shockley in his youth. Only in his
closing paragraph does Shockley say something substantial concerning
Ross Junior: "We knew that Ross was ill and depressed; we
did not realize how deep was the depression. I think he felt
that he had lost the divine touch, the ability to create-that
he was at the end of his rope and could make no further useful
contribution-that he might become a burden to the family. In
the arcane confusion of a sick mind flashed a noble impulse:
to subdue this final indignity to himself and his loved ones
by taking arms 'against a sea of troubles and by opposing end
them" (Lilly Library papers, Box 3). *Ernest
portrays Elsie Lockridge as aware along with her daughter Lillian
that her husband was a sexual predator. Certainly Elsie had a
higher opinion of her father John Wesley Shockley than of her
Indiana historian husband. But in 1957, three years before her
own death, she wrote a fourteen-page essay, "Hoosier with
a Mission," never published and not written for any apparent
purpose, that describes Ross Senior's attempts to bring Indiana
history to life through public storytelling "on the spot"
where historical events had happened or where enduring words
were spoken. Her essay is all praise: "the common people
of Indiana loved his stories. School children loved them; their
parents and teachers loved them; hard-headed business men loved
them." She asks the question, "What aroused in Ross
Lockridge such passionate, voluntary dedication to this humble,
yet exacting, type of service to the history of his state?"
Her answer is largely the influence of his mother, Charlotta
Wray, who grew up in hardship in Virginia and was determined
that her own children would not suffer similar hardships. "Ross
Lockridge was truly his mother's child. He had her quick, active
intelligence, her courageous, independent, and confident spirit,
her indefatigable perseverance. He had, as well, her ready and
exuberant laugh." And so on. It is difficult to believe
that she would have gone out of her way to praise in highest
terms a spouse she had known to be a sexual predator, let alone
responsible for the deaths of two of her children.*Rather
than actively rebelling against his father with behavior typical
of victims of sexual abuse, Ross Junior agreed to serve as amanuensis
to books dictated by his father. The work his father asked him
to do felt more and more onerous over the years, but Ross Junior
was, according to his best friend Malcolm Correll, happy to get
a good wage. Fifty cents an hour was handsome indeed for those
days, and Correll says he improbably enjoyed the public speaking
his father inflicted on him-he enjoyed the discipline of it,
the challenge, sometimes seeking out speaking engagements on
his own. He knew his father was not a first-rate intellect-his
literary sensibilities didn't reach beyond James Fenimore Cooper,
he told Mary Jane Ward. Ross Junior's expressed attitude, however,
was not of scorn or contempt but of gentle satire, as in the
letter to Vernice Baker (Shade, pp. 161-62), where he
describes his father's maniacal behavior at the wheel. I was
surprised when Correll told me that Ross Junior never spoke disparagingly
of his father. We might remember that his best single poem, "Kenapocomoco,"
was an assignment given by his father to preface his own unpublished
novel Black Snake and White Rose. Patriarchal assignments
didn't always result in resentful hack work, though sometimes
they did, as in The Harrisons,an exercise in hagiography,.
He never went through a period of overt filial revolt, but he
needed to cease working on his father's projects-he had one of
his own-and was firm about it (Shade, 246-47).*Herbert
Hendin, M.D., psychiatrist and CEO of Suicide Prevention International,
read my book closely in manuscript and gave me a lengthy consultation
on January 26, 1993, with a follow-up call the next day (notes
on the interview, Lilly Library papers, Box 3). Though he believed
Ross Junior exhibited a psychopathology related to narcissism
and to his relationship with his parents, he dismissed out of
hand even the possibility of early childhood sexual abuse,
given what he termed Ross Junior's early well-developed socialization.
Victims of sexual abuse give early evidence of a sociopathological
acting-out. To the contrary, this was the boy everyone at Finley
elementary school liked, the junior high school student whom
teachers thought happy, the Boy Scout setting out on a hike determined
to do three good deeds, the teenager always trying to "help
out." Hendin said this degree of sociability is blatantly
incompatible with victims of childhood sexual abuse. Early on
they tend visibly to act out their victimhood through precocious
displays of sexuality, depressed withdrawal, and aggression.
Because he in no way conformed to classic patterns of sexual
abuse, it is extremely unlikely that Ross Junior was a victim.
I'd add that
all the early photographs (see, e.g., Shade, the "two
Rosses") image an apparently happy, well-adjusted boy. (This
does not rule out that an emotional vulnerability with respect
to his parents was already in the making, as Hendin observed.)
A good example of his general state of good cheer and willingness
to help out is the three-week historical site tour he took with
his father in 1932 as a college credit-bearing course-he was
not required to enroll-where by all direct accounts he was visibly
cheerful as he drove the truck and set up the privy. Ross Junior
developed many close male and female friendships during his brief
life. He had a gift for friendship, just as he became a family
man, welcoming four children in rapid succession.

The two
Rosses worked as an unequal partnership, with son from an early
age assisting father in his populist history projects. Eventually
Ross Junior made it known he could no longer go about his father's
business. --caption
from Shade of the Raintree by Larry Lockridge

-Breaking
of camp at Clarksville on the Historic Site Recital tour of 1932.
Ross Junior won high marks for always helping out.---caption
from Shade of the Raintree by Larry Lockridge

*Though
looking closely, I found nothing in Ross Junior's writings-whether
in shorthand accounts of dreams or marginalia to passages of
Freud concerning childhood sexuality-that suggests a sensitivity
to issues of childhood sexual abuse, let alone a direct indictment
of his father.*He thought
of his father not as a predator but as a prude; he was concerned
what his father would think of the "cusswords" in Raintree
County. At first his father was indeed jolted by them when
they appeared in a Life magazine excerpt of September
8, 1947, but he soon came around and became one of Raintree
County's biggest fans, comparing it to "myriad-minded
Shakespeare."*Ross
Junior sent Ernest to stay with his grandparents in Bloomington
from mid-January, 1947 to April 1, 1947, while he was spending
time in the east working on final drafts of his novel and Ernest
was not taking well to Manistee, Michigan's weather. Our mother,
Jeanne, and I stayed in Manistee, along with our maternal grandmother,
Lillie Baker. During this period Ernest enrolled in Elm Heights
elementary school in Bloomington (grade 3A) and was taught recitation
by his grandfather. Only four people were in the large Lockridge
house on High Street-Ross Senior, Elsie, Ernest, and occasionally
Lillian. Other arrangements could have been made. I subsequently
stayed with the Mumbys, our mother's sister and her husband,
within easy walking distance of Elm Heights.Had Ross Junior
known Ross Senior from his own experience to be a pederast, would
he have put his own son in harm's way for this extended
period of time? The answer is so emphatically no that
one might ask whether any other counterevidence is needed. I
doubt Ernest would be willing to indict his father for knowingly
endangering him, but on his own terms one wonders how he could
not bring such an indictment.
The same question
arises when our parents placed Ernest and Jeanne in the High
Street house during their trip to Hollywood in November, 1947.
(Still a toddler, Ross III stayed with Baker relatives in Martinsville,
I stayed with the Mumbys.) Ross Junior also took time out from
the pressures of success to go on two camping trips to Miami
County with his father and Ernest (I was along for one of them)
in the summers of 1946 and 1947. There had been an earlier camping
excursion on the Eel River with Ross Senior and Ernest in the
summer of 1942. Ross Junior had no problem bedding down in a
tent with his father again, twice with Ernest, once with Ernest
and me. He had fond memories of camping on the Eel River (the
Kenapocomoco) with his father as a boy, and these later camping
trips were reenactments. The Eel River is the prototype of the
Shawmucky in Raintree County, identified with the life
force itself. *Ross
Junior never sexually abused his own children, a common transgenerational
pattern in victims of childhood sexual abuse. And though Shockley
Lockridge was a depressed person and alcoholic during the years
he helped raise a family with his spouse Mary Kay, he never sexually
abused his two daughters, Kay and Anne, according to Kay Lockridge.*He also
had a healthy sex life with his wife until the depression set
in in October, 1947. The letters he sent from Boston in early
1947 are as flirtatious as ever, and it was then that he embedded
the naked body of his wife, for which she had posed, into the
landscape of Raintree County, a geoglyph that scandalized the
clergy when it appeared on the novel's book jacket. The two had
not decided against having more children. As is well known, victims
of early childhood abuse characteristically have great impairments
in their own adult sex lives.*The letters
that Ross Junior wrote his father at the nadir of his mental
health in Hollywood in late 1947 (Shade, pp. 382-83) strike
most readers as moving, respectful, and affectionate-by far the
warmest words he ever sent his father. This exchange exhibits
neither guilt on Ross Senior's part nor resentment on Ross Junior's.
Is it likely that this exchange could have taken place during
the very period that early child sexual abuse was at last destroying
Ross Junior's sanity?*None
of Ross Junior's close friends ever heard a word concerning any
sexual deviancy in Ross Senior, never a hint of scandal. Ross
Junior shared intimate sexual details routinely with Malcolm
Correll and Curtis Lamorey. He never mentioned sexual abuse by
his father-in itself not decisive, yes, since victims of sexual
abuse frequently remain silent, but still worth noting. Nor did
he ever say anything concerning his father's sexual deviancy
to his wife, Vernice Baker Lockridge, who worked on some of Ross
Senior's archives after his death and arranged for their donation
to the New Harmony Workingmen's Institute. She never lost respect
for Ross Senior who, in Ernest's view, indirectly killed her
husband.*In February
1946, Ross Junior named his third son after his father. It was
a significant tribute, given that he himself had never relished
his own derivative name. How likely is it that he would pass
along the name of his sexual predator to his own son? He needed
to insist on the "Junior" with his publishers since
Ross Senior was better known in Indiana than he himself could
ever hope to be. To lay claim to "Ross Lockridge" would
imply that his father didn't exist, and he didn't wish to injure
his father's pride. *One of
the last business items Ross Junior tended to before his death
was to increase the amount of his donation to the IU Foundation
earmarked to his father's Hoosier Historical Institutes. There
is no evidence that he did this in response to his father's importunities.
Ross Senior spoke proudly of the donation after his son's death.*One of
the last conversations he had with his mother (Shade, p.
424) took place in his small bedroom, the sunroom, on the second
floor of the house on High Street, Bloomington, where my siblings
and I listened to Ross Senior's tales and where Ernest remembers
gropings. Elsie said to a reporter after her son's death that
he spoke of how happy he had been in this very room. "I
wish I could go back to childhood," he said (Lilly Library
papers, Box 14).*The decision
to move back to Bloomington, forsaking both Boston and the Hollywood
pipe dream, is a homing gesture that proved unfortunate but that
seems unlikely had Ross Junior regarded his father as a sexual
predator whose influence on him had been baleful. *I tried
to inveigle the "secret" to which Elsie's homecare
nurse was privy concerning the suicide of Ross Junior. Though
she would not tell me directly what the secret was, she agreed
to say what it was not, upon my questioning. I asked if
Ross Junior was having an affair. "No." I asked if
he had in fact been murdered. "No." I asked if he had
been the victim of childhood sexual abuse by his father. "No."
The only question where she expressed some hesitation was whether
Ross Junior had dropped a strong hint to his mother the final
afternoon of March 6 as to what he had in mind to do-to this,
a hesitant no. This remains the best single explanation
of what the secret was that Ruth Carter took to her grave. If
true, Elsie would have had considerable guilt in the matter,
confessing it to her homecare nurse alone.*There
is implicit counterevidence in Raintree County itself-for
two reasons. Ross Senior leaves his mark everywhere in this historical
novel. Although Ross Junior developed a much darker view of American
history, he made use of the "historic site recital"
format and recycled much of the same lore that fascinated his
father-from heroes and Indians to the idea of the historical
site itself, the memorials that history has left of itself and
that need to be remembered and recited. The novel's encyclopedic
scope echoes in a more resonate key his father's encyclopedic
approach to the State of Indiana, where he was known as "Mr.
Indiana."
Even more notable
is the erotic component of the novel that alarmed the clergy
and decent folk in 1948. Sex is life's vitality in this novel-it
is treated in a largely celebratory manner, whether John Shawnessy
and Susanna Drake having sex under the raintree or the bull mating
with a heifer in the novel's central section. Sex is also implicated
in the Fall, and one pays for one's pleasure throughout Raintree
County, where the Perfessor argues sex's negative economy
and Shawnessy its powerful procreative energy. Sex isn't presented
as perverse, with the possible exception of the evangelist Reverend
Jarvey and his seductive dandelion wine, but Jarvey, a dark,
comedic, and prescient characterization, in no way resembles
Ross Senior. Sex is predatory in Ross Junior's early epic poem
The Dream of the Flesh of Iron (1939-41), but it
never takes the form of homosexual pederasty-rather, as with
Jarvey, it involves sexual predation of vulnerable females.
All such counterevidence
can be reconstituted as evidence if one subscribes to a psychology
of denial that finds in manifest behavior a compensation for
neurotic drives kept hidden from oneself. The homing of Ross
Junior to Bloomington, so read, would represent the action of
the abused son still under the sway of his father as a loadstar,
drawing him back to the primal scene of abuse in a fatal melodrama.
But when counterevidence becomes "evidence" through
this kind of thinking, there is no room for debate. We would
need some piece of direct evidence to settle the matter. As of
this writing, no such evidence has emerged. We also need to guard
against an implicit false syllogism that takes this form: "Victims
of childhood sexual abuse often end by taking their own lives;
Ross Lockridge, Jr. took his own life; therefore, Ross Lockridge,
Jr. was a victim of childhood sexual abuse."
I stand by my
account of Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s life as narrated in Shade
of the Raintree and altogether reject my brother Ernest's
conviction that sexual abuse is the "skeleton key"
to the tragedy.